Our school literacy learning uses current evidence and research to teach reading. Our whole school Stuctured Literacy instruction ensures that phonology, morphology, orthography, syntax, semantics and discourse level language are explicitly, systematically and cumulatively taught.

Our teachers are invested in ongoing professional learning to continually refine our shared understandings on the cognitive science of how we all learn to read and write. Some of the training we have received on our Science of Learning journey include; LETRS, Lyn Stone – Language Arts, Lyn Stone – Spelling for Life, Yoshimoto OG dyslexia training, The Writing Revolution as well as intensive coaching on Responsive Teaching Routines with Bron Ryrie-Jones and Spelling Mastery EDI with Clare Scott.

We use the Reading Rope, Sounds Write and Spelling Mastery to explicitly teach students to develop sound/letter knowledge, accurate word decoding and automaticity in decoding simple words, then sentences and passages.

Students begin reading with decodeable readers and are scaffolded by classroom teachers into rich literature and texts. As students become proficient they are then able to read more complex texts independently.

We have a whole school Reading Spine that is a curation of Mentor Texts aligned with Core Knowledge Units and Class Novels that students explore with support from classroom teachers.

These books have been chosen to build knowledge and assist in the teaching of content, background knowledge and building a rich vocabulary.

Our Class Novels have been curated from Doug Lemov’s – Reading Reconsidered Reading Spine and the 5 Plagues of Reading. These are inclusive of the 5 text types that children should have access to in order to successfully navigate reading with confidence – Archaic, Non-linear time sequences, Narratively complex, Figurative/Symbolic and Resistant texts.

Over the course of their schooling life children will be exposed to books including; Charlotte’s Web, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Uncanny, The Borrowers as well as literature from authors including; Oliver Jeffers, Shaun Tan, Anthony Browne, Grace Lin, Roald Dahl, Mem Fox, May Gibbs, Jeannie Baker and many more…

Our school is guided by evidence and research to teach reading. We use the Reading Rope and Sounds Write to teach reading.

As a Sounds Write school we develop our readers sound/letter knowledge, accurate word decoding and automaticity in decoding simple words.

As our students become more proficient their language comprehension is developed by; activating word meanings, understanding sentences, making inferences, comprehension monitoring and understanding text structure.

We implement Sounds Write to begin initial writing. Students learn to write the initial code - upper and lower case letters. The focus on handwriting in the early years is very important to developing fluent writers.

As students progress through the upper years the learning is guided by the Writing Revolution to further develop students understanding of sentences as the building blocks of writing, sentence expansion and note taking, planning before writing, single paragraph outlines and revising drafts of writing.

Teaching and Learning practices at Mount Pleasant Primary School are designed to improve the learning outcomes for all students in the school. We provide a broad, open curriculum that encourages students to transfer skills and make connections with the real world.

MPPS aims to provide each student with a range of learning experiences that:

• build on existing experiences;
• promote individual excellence in learning;
• develop self-esteem, confidence and independence;
• encourage students to think, collaborate and problem solve;
• foster a desire and enthusiasm for life-long learning.